The Best Articles of the Year: medium.com

Pomplamoose just finished a 28-day tour. We played 24 shows in 23 cities around the United States. It was awesome: Nataly crowd surfed for the first time ever, we sold just under $100,000 in tickets, and we got to rock out with people we love for a full month.

Yasiin Bey and I make beautiful music together. We are yin and yang, our styles complement each other very nicely. While it’s always a treat for us to perform together as Black Star, the style and pace of our solo performances are different.

Four years ago I temporarily moved to Puerto Rico. I went to PR to seek the New American Dream, a dream that had swept through American business culture, launched a billion dollar self-help industry, alienated my generation, and killed uncounted people through its wild pursuit.

The concept invaded my consciousness as only an insidious radio advert can. Then came that slogan: “Travel yourself interesting,” and here was the rub — the once tedious Mr. Nuttall had been injected with an ebullient charisma by way of a simple trip abroad.

Google has Go, first conceived in 2009. Facebook introduced Hack last spring. And Apple unveiled Swift not long after. In war, as George Orwell had it, the winners write the history books. In tech, the winning companies are writing the programming languages.

Once upon a time, a friend of mine accidentally took over thousands of computers. He had found a vulnerability in a piece of software and started playing with it. In the process, he figured out how to get total administration access over a network.

It’s almost inevitable: I encounter Minecraft somewhere online—it’s easy to do, because there’s a lot of Minecraft out there—and I end up convinced I’m doing the wrong thing with my life. Let me explain.

I was 29 years old and living the dream, or at least my version of it, when everything changed. I was in love with an amazing woman and had a rent-controlled sublet in New York City’s West Village and a good job at a glossy magazine.

I saw a film recently on an airplane that made me cry. The film was a love story but the love part of the story didn’t make me cry. No, the scene that made me cry was about paper. The movie focuses on a Japanese publishing company’s small dictionary unit.

When Josh was 10 years old, he sat cross-legged on the floor in his parent’s neat, suburban home in Australia, enraptured. It was May 1996 and Andy Thomas had just stepped out of the space shuttle Endeavour and onto the tarmac of Runway 33 of the Kennedy Space Center.

MODERN MEDICINE CLUTCHES at a number of dreams. Some, like developing an AIDS vaccine, can seem tantalizingly close. Others, like curing cancer, have frustrated so many minds for so many years that we’ve learned to temper our expectations. Then there’s regeneration.

Giulio Selvaggi was asleep when the shaking started. It was the night of April 5, 2009, and the head of Italy’s National Earthquake Center had worked late into the night in Rome before going home to crash. From the motion of his bed, Selvaggi could tell the quake was big — but not close.

The hardest part of design is presenting work. You can’t even argue about this. I’ve seen people who did amazing work get up in front of a client and lay eggs. I’ve also seen people do alright work and work clients around their little finger.

Chances are, if you are reading this, you work in the tech industry. Chances are, you are currently, have recently, or aspire to be involved in the creation of a modern digital product. This article aims to give you a deep understanding of the role of Product Design in this process.

We know that we have built something which is genuinely useful: almost any team which adopts Slack as their central application for communication would be significantly better off than they were before. That means we have something people want.

An SMS hitting my BlackBerry on Sunday evenings used to decide my destination and client for the coming week. After few hours of sleep, the private driver was taking me to the Rome Fiumicino airport so I could take my fancy business-class flight to NYC.

On Monday, October 21, 2013, I sent this letter to our entire team at Airbnb. I have decided to publish this in the event it is helpful to entrepreneurs building their cultures. Our next team meeting is dedicated to Core Values, which are essential to building our culture.

When Josh was 10 years old, he sat cross-legged on the floor in his parent’s neat, suburban home in Australia, enraptured. It was May 1996 and Andy Thomas had just stepped out of the space shuttle Endeavour and onto the tarmac of Runway 33 of the Kennedy Space Center.

On a Saturday last March, my Berlin neighbors had a plant funeral. They set up three-meter-high wood crosses on our street corner and placed funeral candles all along the street, and the children drew posters of crying trees and flowers. There was live music, and everyone got quite drunk.

I came across a website whose purpose was to provide a super detailed list of every handheld computing environment going back to the early 1970's. It did a great job except for one glaring omission: the first mobile platform that I helped develop.

Growing up, my understanding of leadership was that it was a specific role, gift-wrapped certain responsibilities and bestowed upon someone, either by a Very Authoritative Person (like a VIP, but cooler) or by some sort of Formal Democratic Vote.

Managers are under fire these days. Zappos “got rid of their bosses” recently. And it’s no wonder. From Dilbert to “Office Space”, we all know the trope of the useless and conniving political player who’s managed to entrench himself into an otherwise well-meaning organization.

Merlin is a commercial project management software application for Mac OS X, developed by ProjectWizards GmbH in Germany. It focusses on project plans creation, tracking the status of activities, assignment of resources, and managing budgets. Merlin contains a reporting system that includes visualization of activity timelines , net maps , and resource workload in bar diagrams. It allows collaborative work among project stakeholders using the Merlin Mac OS X application and multi-user-mode-editing over the local network or internet. Additional sharing options for Web and iPhone project sharing are also possible. By optional sharing licenses, published projects can get accessed over a web browser by project stakeholders working on other operating systems like Windows, Linux or the iPhone . For larger teams a server solution is provided in form of a Mac OS X System Preference Pane handling a watched projects folder and the necessary sharing options.